The Ridged Tattoo
by Fidelity Darkling
Summary: Blank and Soquo are from two different places, but they are more alike than they can fathom. With nothing but a cryptic scar/tattoo to help them, can they discover their roots and save the world? Haven't read comic. movieverse.
1. Life of Stolen Memories

_Preword: Soquo is pronounced "soh-KOO-oh"_

_**Disclaimer: The language that is shown in italics in my story is purely of my own invention, any and all words used that DO have an actual meaning in any language, real or otherwise (that is not of my own invention) is completely coincidental and was not intentional.**_

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"_Felaçía Öledèc soqüo mcvonô Çemáè ÑoquiÅ saï"_

That was the first thing that Soquo ever heard. The soothing feminine voice that still haunted him and his memory. It was the only thing that he could remember past before his earliest _concrete_ memory.

Like the fish with whom he swam, the silent beings that they were, he remembered little of the past. though he did not waste time to ponder on such things, since there was nothing he knew but the _now._

The _now _and the _wet _and the creatures of his vast blue home. The sharks, the whales, the krill and shrimp, and the fish. His most recent family of half-sized scaly swimmates. Well, for now they were his family.

Because of the vast expanse of ocean, and his compulsive tendency to learn and explore, he often found himself wandering with multiple different schools of fish, pods of dolphins, etc. sometimes he had even fond himself wandering with a rogue shark or stray whale.

But there was never a time when he was ever truly and completely alone, (well, without the companionship of his fellow sea creatures) at least as far as his failed memory could recall, he could only remember fourteen thousand three hundred fifteen days into the past—not including the memory of the woman's voice that he had heard. He had no idea how long ago _that_ had been. But he was never alone.

_Alone._

The word always sent shivers up his spine, ever since he encountered that shredded old life vest while exploring his home and learned of the word from the humming, pulsing memories of _fear, _of _alone…_

He had never thought of the possibility of such a thing, of being alone when others are around you. It hadn't even bothered him at the back of his mind… he had never thought that there might be others, or that there might not be… until the actual memory of the emotion brought by this shred of a life vest.

The hum wasn't exactly a hum, but more of a tugging at the back of his mind, sometimes that made him a map of things around him, similar to _sonar_. And sometimes the humming allowed him to see into the memories of objects, sometimes things that were yet to come, sometimes it was just a reflection of what was happening now. Both the future and the present were rare finds in objects. Mostly it was merely the past.

This particular shred of bright orange life vest held the memory of a young man lost at sea. His name had been David Smith. The hum told Soquo that he had been on a ship called the HMS Titanic. The man's wife and daughter had been taken off of the ship already, and he was left with the rest of the 3rd class citizens on board, on the deck of the sinking ship. Mr. Smith had been the last man left alive in the water. He couldn't move his arms or legs, and he was close to death. No one around him moved either. And the man that floated next to him had stopped breathing puffs of steam long ago.

No one else was alive. He was alone.

He kept the life vest, tied it onto his back with a rope he had made from seaweed. He made sure not to read the end of the tale of it's wearer, not wanting to, but he kept it with him, shutting his mind to the tiny, continuous hum which emitted from it.

He still kept it since it held an important memory from the _land, _the most fascinating subject that he had learned from the memories from this, that, and other _intriguing _things he found from dry land.

Soquo had seen and felt many memories from the land, extraordinary things: finless creatures with strange, fiber-like _hair ­_sprouting from the tops of their head or out of their entire bodies, weird four-legged animals, some with only two legs, some with _wings_, some even had no legs.

He remembered four hundred days back, when he had caught his first glance of his reflection in an abandoned _hand mirror_ he had found in a sunken _boat. _At first he thought that it was another creature of the ocean like the many he had encountered, until he realized that every move that he made, the reflection made as well.

The memory in this particular object wasn't all that significant to Soquo, just a young woman who enjoyed the high life, and then went out on the boat with her husband and just shipwrecked five miles from the coast. But the image of himself—white-green-pigmented skin, golden-black eyes, bald head, silvery gills—fascinated him, he was so used to the familiar faces of the humans whose memories he took from their abandoned objects. So he kept the _mirror_ and tied it to his waist with the same rope that tied the shred of the life jacket to his back.

Also tied onto this greenish-red-brown rope was a makeshift spear made from a long stick of sharpened driftwood (he had felt the memories of this piece of driftwood which was made from an old tree that remembered back to the many _Indians_ and their spears), a short knife he had found along with the mirror (he figured he'd need this along with the spear to fight off any creature with an intention to hurt him), and a small book made of many tiny drawings of _people_, which also had the memories of each portrait—the most mysterious of these drawings was that of a _mermaid_, but he found no memory of this creature, just the drawer in a room, drawing the picture, no mermaid. Nothing that seemed even remotely like himself.

The most interesting thing was not tied onto the rope, but rather burned onto the tender webbing between his fingers on his left hand: a series of designs, swirling, swooping, patterned and repetitious, but random and, somehow, _changing_.

One day the design would have one swoop in one place, between his pinkie and ring finger, then the next day when he would wake up, the same design would be between his thumb and forefinger and then gone the next day. Same with the swirls and dots. There was a certain… air… of bad omen to the strange _tattoo_-like scars_…_ It wasnot a hum, but just a _feeling_ of a warning of what was to come that Soquo had whenever he glanced at it.

He had long since given up on understanding the changing pattern. Without a memory to give its meaning, it was just random nonsense to him. So he ignored it, but never forgot it, although during his wanderings, his mind strayed back to the patterns on his mutilated flesh, continuously contemplating the many possible meanings to this changing pattern.

While swimming leisurely with his many families of migrating fish, his mind would wander to the ridged scar tissue and he would block out his senses to contemplate the various meanings of this patterned tattoo. After these long days of pondering, he came to the conclusion that he should set out to look for people of his own kind.

The next day, he found a large school of migrating fish and set out with them to look for his own kind.


	2. Blank

_Hey i just wanted to post this forethought, the chapter hasn't actually changed :) If you want to see what Blank looks like in my mind, go to my profile and look at my pic. I drew it myself :))_

Blank… yeah….

That sounded about right…

Blank.

Nice ring to it, too. Nice beat. One syllable. Nice hum.

That was her name now. Her _name._

Since those _whitecoats _wouldn't give her one, she decided to give herself one. Blank smiled smugly and quietly through the glass of her 10-by-15-foot tank at one of the whitecoats whose back was turned to her. She stuck her white tongue out at the pudgy creature: the finless little cretin.

_Heh, _she thought, _how'd you like _that_?? I have a name now, and there 'aint nothin' you can do about it!!_

Of course, such slander language was enforced in Blank's mind just to be different from her white-clad creators. They had a fancy, scientific, organized way of talking. They had a deathly calmness to their thoughts, _disgusting._

She hated every single one of them; she had felt the thoughts of the other… things… like herself in different rooms. She knew exactly what the _whitecoats _did. Every last detail. They disgusted her.  
Blank was so used to the quietness of her old habitat, the serenity, the wet, and the wide-open tank. Nothing but her, the hum, and the tattoo that she entertained her self with… ever since before she could remember… well, as far as she could tell. The old aquarium where she had at least a few shrimp and a couple fish to keep her company, even though they were meant as her meals. But she had taken a better liking to the seaweed that was planted in her tank and the rotten egg that one of the younger whitecoats had thrown into her tank as a prank… the delectable, green little things that they were.

Blank was so used to the quietness of her old tank… then they stuffed her into a small 4-by-5 tank and put her into a dark, swaying room. She had never been se traumatized in her life… the jerking, rolling room… she thought she was going to die. She blacked out after a time in the terrible room, and when she woke up, she was in her new home, where she now spent her life.

She had seen only one other hybrid human-animal creature walk past the hall, during her first few days there. This one was mostly human, and there was nothing that Blank could see why the youngling was there, until it turned sideways. Long, beautiful, white (although somewhat dirt-smudged) wings protruded from the small hybrid's shoulder blades. It had looked on at her in pity, with wide, unsurprised, and unexpectedly wise eyes. The wisdom of a human past its… her very young years. The little blond bird kid looked only to be five or so years of age and had the world-weary eyes of one of the older whitecoats Blank had encountered.

The meeting was a fleeting one, but it was enough for Blank to listen to the memories humming like a swarm of bees, making a direct beeline to Blank's thoughts.

That was when she learned of the creating, what the whitecoats were called, and everything else in this forsaken place.

Soon after this strange encounter, the whitecoats began their testing on Blank as well.

They prodded her, poked her, made her get out of the water, made her run, made her swim vast distances, made her black out more than once from lack of oxygen. And she had come close to death many more times.

What she hated most of all was the running.

The unnatural and foreign activity hurt her feet and mostly ended with her on the ground behind the treadmill, gasping like a fish out of water, her gills begging for the sweet nectar of water, the sensor pads torn off of her skin and splayed every which way in the cursingly white room. She always ended back in her tank with no memory of how she got there.

After a while, they began to do surgeries.

There was one that inhibited any movement in her right arm for five days, and there was another where she couldn't think straight for a month, and there were countless others that did absolutely nothing to her, but she always wondered what they did.

And then there was one last one. This one was one in which she went in being able to listen to a pin drop from across a noisy room and which she came out of not being able to hear a chainsaw had one been turned on right next to her ears. As soon as she came to, she had felt the side of her head and found nothing there but a few scars. They had chopped off her ears.

She had nothing to rely on but the hum.

Forever.

Her memory was completely gone from before she had even come to the first place.

Now she had lost her hearing, and could hear nothing. The whitecoats ignored her completely after that last surgery. They stopped being interested with her. They ceased to even look at her. She felt something coming, like her death.

She felt like a nothing, like a Blank.

She liked her name.

It was a very fitting name.


	3. Dr Bolivar

_Hmmmm… what do we have here?_

His rustic voice was the only thing that scared Blank in this entire institution. He was the only pathetic excuse for a creature that could send shivers down her spine and drop lead weights into her stomach. She let the weights hold her down to the bottom of the empty tank, where she stared down at the all-too-sterile bottom, pretending to scrutinize its flawless steel surface. She really didn't want to look into his ugly mug just then.

_An icthyosapien, straight from sector 135A, I presume?_

_Yes, sir, it's the only transfer since numbers 54 and 55 came in last year, _the woman clearly felt the same way that Blank did.

What's a year, anyway?

_Good, good, did the last experiment pull though?_

_N-n-no sir,_ she was even stuttering in her mind! Blank would have almost felt pity for her if she weren't scared out of her seashell as well, _I-I-I'm sorry sir, _she added, _s-s-she seems to have lost her hearing, she d-d-doesn't respond to anything other th-th-than mental s-s-stimulation now._

Blank chanced a glance at the two. The greasy-haired man's glass eye was staring to the side, skewed and giving him a look about him that said nothing but "looney." His good eye, buggy and grey, seeming to be bulging out of his disgustingly fat head, was staring straight at Blank. As if she were more of a freak than before. He seemed pretty p.o.'d as well.

We locked eyes for a few seconds, his lungs opened to suck in a mouthful of air, his fat gut was apparently obstructing his breathing. His good eye was becoming bloodshot as if he had entered a staring contest. Blank blinked her inner eyelids just to show off a bit. _Haha! I have superior abilities! _He seemed to have picked up on my mocking expression and raised an angry, but somehow smug, eyebrow at me. He turned back to the woman as I dropped my once-mocking gaze back to the bottom of the tank.

_I want you to take her out now. _He said to the woman

_S-s-sir? _Blank hadn't seen her before, maybe she didn't know the routine. She tried to send her a mental thought, _you take me out, torture me, and then put me back in._

The woman jumped and Blank thought that she gotten the telepathic signal, but then she realized that _he _had just jerked his hand over towards Blank.

He repeated, _take her out of the tank and test her. We need to know if we can get her hearing back… what's the good of a deaf fish? _he added with a smile.

_Oh… Y-yes sir._

_And, Dr. Mey?_

_Yes sir?_

_Welcome._

_Thank you sir._

And with that, Dr. Bolivar walked out of the room.

The new Dr. Mey turned to the wary Blank.

_Well, what should we do now, goldfish? _The woman asked Blank in her head, holding up a finger to tap the glass. It was only her first day here and she was already catching onto the names. _Should we start with the anesthetic? _She pressed a green button on the side of the tank and a green liquid made it's way slowly towards Blank's aching gills. She kept her contemptful eyes on the woman.

_I'll tell you what you can do, you can shove it up your… _and then there was a blackout. The last thing that Blank thought was, _I'm really was getting tired of these bloody blackouts._


	4. Change in the Tide

Soquo was feeling peaceful. The simple thoughts of these tiny-brained Cods always helped him to relax and concentrate on using his eyes instead of the hum. Sometimes the hum was quite practical, such as when there was an attacking shark, yet frequently it was just bothersome.

Every thought on every mind and every memory, however fleeting, crossing a being's mind was on Soquo's as well. He knew from a peak into other's minds that his brain was much more complex than other organisms': he could focus on different constant streams of thought, no matter how many, at exactly the same time. Even though this was true, there was sometimes not enough room for his own thoughts. This infuriated him.

He breathed a sigh of relief as he swam with the repeating mantra the fish though in union: _swim swim swim swim swim swim swim…_

The chant was quite rhythmic. He liked it. From time to time, he would find his inner eyelids closing slightly as the song hypnotized him into a small trance. Sometimes he found his own thoughts joining into the hymn. They continued lazily through the curving southward current, which would ultimately turn east, as the fish knew.

The best part was that none of them asked about his carry-on items, which most fish normally did. hi didn't feel like explaining again, for the thirteen-hundred-and-twenty-second time.

_Swim swim swim swim…_

They swam nonstop for seven days, idly chanting the same mantra as they ambled through the vast blue. The bright orb above the surface of the water made its routine arc over the ocean and, ever so slightly each day, became higher in the sky during its apex. The water grew warmer and the current began to slope eastward.

Soquo stopped suddenly, as if a large leash had suddenly snapped around his wrist and pulled him in the opposite direction of the cod, making him come to a dead stop. The cods' dull thoughts were fading into the distance as the waded there in the deep. Then they were gone. He looked down at his left hand, the source of the tug, which was sprawled behind him, keeping the leash taunt.

He tried to tug his hand out of the invisible noose, but only prevailed in straining his muscles. He looked in the direction of the cod, begging with his mind for them to come back. Alas, none came.

Suddenly, his hand came alive.

The patterns on his hand swirled with a newfound velocity, his hand contorted, moving of its own accord, twitching, clenching, and finally, pointing in the direction of the source of the invisible leash.

Soquo stared in wonder and awe as the tattoo continued to twist and twirl like it had never done before at such a speed. The spirals flexed and the dots jumped out at his face, as if they wished to free themselves. He couldn't tell for sure, but it seemed that his hand was glowing with a dull grey light, vibrating out of the very center of his anatomy. His hand suddenly began to shake, as if from strenuous activity, and suddenly... went limp.

The spirals stopped contorting and the dots came to a standstill.

The leash was gone.

He pulled his hand to his side and tried its functions, flexing his fingers, relaxing, and gripping. Everything was quite alright in his hand, as far as he could tell. There wasn't even a hint of what had just happened.

Soquo relaxed slightly and looked into the direction of where the leash had come from. Northwest. He looked back in the direction the cod had gone and looked forward again. It was outside of the swimming channels, the direction was cold and against the tide. No fish swam there, so Soquo had never been near it. He swam forward slightly and stopped suddenly, grasping his head in his hands and gasping like a fish out of water.

It was as if someone had knocked his head over with a frying pan--a memory which he had accidently gotten from a piece of a rusted frying pan. Every thought in his mind, except for his own, had stopped, had come to a grinding halt in his mind, smashing against the front of his head in a second of pure agonizing pain.

His body writhed about himself, acting like the hand had not two seconds ago. His souvenirs smacked against his body and the tip of his makeshift spear punctured a hole in the flesh of his lower leg, but he didn't notice it. The shroud of lifesaver worked itself loose and floated towards the ceiling of the Ocean, a neon speck in the never-ending blue, he only saw it out of the corner of his eye as his eyes rolled around without control.

His head jarred from side to side, trying to shake the notion of the two truths that his now-inhibited thought processes could define:

There was no hum. And it scared him.

After fifteen minutes of hellish pain and a few more of harrowing panic, Soquo was able to stop twitching and warily collect his thoughts about himself, he still shook slightly from the impact of the thoughts in his brain. He loosened his hands from his head and dared not swim back the way he came, nor did he dare to swim forward. His own thoughts reconstructed themselves, reconstructed about the loss of his hum, which his mind had been dependent on for his entire known life.

He felt like an alcoholic who had just terminated his use of the bottle. He vomited.

As soon as he finally was able to function again and the grinding pain had turned to a dull throb, he took inventory of his possessions. Other than the life vest, everything was in its place, with one casualty.

The mirror had collided with the art book and was now sporting a large crack on its once-flawless surface. Soquo picked it up and looked at himself in the fragmented mirror, seeing hundreds of Soquos, each a fragmented piece of himself. He wrapped it in the rope that had held the vest to keep the mirror pieces from falling out and put it back in its place.

When he finished securing it, he set about figuring out what to do.


	5. Trapped

He was trapped.

Soquo felt as if he were in the center of a huge rubber wall. Whenever he tried to go backwards or forewards, he felt the same buzzing in his head and was both mentally and phisically repelled from the invisible barriers. Though he couldn't go backwards or forewards, he could go up all the way to the surface of the ocean or down to the vory bottom or sideways in either direction for an indefinite amoung of length.

He had no choice but to choose a direction--left or right-- and go.

Soquo swam down to the ocean floor and took off in a northwestern direction. He warily continued and, every once in a while, checked if there was any weakening of the wall. None whatsoever. This lasted five hours. Soquo felt that he was going nowhere, he felt so alone without the school of fish and so lost without the Hum to guide him. What if he never got the hum back? What if he were trapped in this wall forever?

He worried over this thought so obsessively that he almost didn't see the glint from the ocean floor. There was something down on the ocean floor, something shiny and interesting. Soquo turned to face the strange thing, feet to the sun. Acting on the instinct of a lifetime of scavenging, he began to swim towards it, reaching his hand out to the object. It was a luminescent blue, not shiny. It thrummed soundly with a hidden light source from its interior. It was so beautiful... he wanted to keep it. It didn't look like anything he had encountered on the ocean floor yet.. manmade or not. He continued reaching for it, the want was almost unbearable. His hand got two inches away from it and was about to touch it.

He yelped as it suddenly came to life, darting past his head in a whir of fury. Soquo followed the object with his eyes as best as he could but lost sight of it in the deep blue liquid. He squinted into the gloom of the blueish atmosphere, his eyes sweeping left and right, searching for the twinkling object. he didn't see it.

ZZHHUMMM!

The luminescent object flew back towards Soquo's head, missing him by a few inches as he darted out of its way. It zoomed away and was lost again.

Soquo turned to face where it had gone....

ZZHHUMMM!!!

It zoomed towards him out of the gloom, aimed for his head agian. The light grew brighter as it got closer to him, and, even without his Hum, Soquo knew that it was heading for an intent to hurt. A thrumming roar emitted from the light. He tried to flinch out of the way, but the light was just too fast. He tried to think quickly and raised his right hand to fend it off, his other hand curled around his knife butt. He closed his inner eyelids as the light got too bright to bear. He began to raise the knife towards the oncoming threat. He had to close his outer eyelids now. He pointed the knife at the direction he remembered the light coming from, throwing himself backwards slightly. He yelled out loud.

When he realized that he was the only sound there was.

He opened up his outer eyelid slightly. All he could see were two lights in the gloom, both floating a few centimeters from his knife where it lay poised in the water in his hand. He cautiously opened his inner eyelids and found the blueish object he had seen earlier and a completely identical one that floated next to it. Now that neither of the lights were attacking him, he could appreciate their hypnotic beauty.

Both objects thrummed in coordinated flashes of light, sometimes they went out of synchronization, seeming to react to the flashes the other was making. They were communicating.

Soquo moved his hand to the left so that he could look at them more closely. They followed his hand.

Then he noticed that his hand was lighting up as well. All of the tiny scars on the webbing were completely lit up an thrumming as the lights were.

Soquo waited.

The two lights stopped after a while. They seemed to just notice Soquo again and swam up to his face. Soquo was tense again, but their intent was different, almost helpful this time.

Each chose one of Soquo's eyes and swam straight to it. He couldn't stop it he almost didn't want to, as if he were paralyzed by this rare sight. which he probably was. He didn't even close his eyes to the beautiful flashbulbs. They got closer... closer... ever closer....


	6. New Prison

_Gasp… gasp… gasp… gasp…_

There was nothing in the world. Only the feeling of lungs trying to pull air out of the waterless atmosphere. Only the throbbing feeling of the breathing machine against scales. Where was the Hum?

Blank lay there, blind and Humless, deaf and alone.

She tried every brain function that she could previously use to expand her mind out into the open. But she found nothing but a cold, hard, impenetrable steel wall.

She couldn't even visualize it in her mind, nor pretend to touch it with her dried-out and paralyzed hand.

She wanted to cry. To roll over on her stomach and weep into the cold hard surface now pressing into her back.

She couldn't sense anyone near her, the vibrations from the machine impaired her once-superb sense of the presence of others. She could have felt for footsteps even if she were blind and Humless. But she couldn't even do that. She felt so alone. Even hostile company would have been welcome here.

All she could do was breathe, for however long she could at this point.

_Gasp… gasp… gasp…_

There was nothing out there but the cold dark paralyzing... and somehow waterless... fliquid.

The surgery had failed. She tried to fight. They injected her with something. They put her here. She woke up. She was now alone.

First she had denied it.

_This is my imagination, _she had thought to herself, _I must be dreaming. A really bad dream, at that._

She waited for a few hours.

When she realized that this was very real, she felt anger and contempt for the whitecoats. _The stupid, insolent researchers, doing this… Breeding us for the "betterment of mankind" and when we don't work… put us here?? Not put us in a nice tank and keep us alive until we die? NONO! THAT would be too easy… too HUMANE!! What did I even DO to deserve this?!_

She had ranted like this for two days.

Then she accepted it, in the least form she could muster.

_Well, they may take me out soon, put me back in my tank Until then, I'll just have to be the one with the strongest intellect._

After seven days of talking to herself like this, her mind began to empty. After a few weeks, she began to loose herself.

She began to find herself drawn into half-dreams. At one point she found herself in a large, flat field, striped with rows and rows of strawberry plants, the sun beating down on her face like gentle waves of warm color. In her arms was a tiny, but feisty, animal with floppy ears and shining button eyes and an extremely wet nose. She held its tawny form in her arms as the little thing tried to jump up to her face from the basket she had made out of her faded red dress and succeeded once in placing his pink tongue on her face.

She laughed, though tried to restrain the happy animal with her tan arm. Tan arm…?

But by that point the image had flickered and she was suddenly in a cave near the ocean, her hair caked to her neck with rainwater, thunder crashing around her, dirt on her face which was contorted in a grimace over her impaled arm as she clutched it to her stomach, the blood staining her white apron red. The same animal that she had seen in the previous part of her dream was sitting next to her, though slightly larger and stronger-looking, standing over her, whimpering.

The image flickered again and she was on a three-masted ship, leaning over the rail, ocean mist spraying into her face, sweet open air swelling in her lungs, almost wishing to be in a dress and even a corset again and out of these pants and baggy shirt. She itched to take down her hair out of its three-cornered hat. She watched as the other men played with the greying animal as they all swam in the vast Ocean.

The image flickered and blended into another scene, and on and on. It was always a dream of her as a human with the huge... dog... yes... it was called a dog.

All of these dreams almost seemed real, actually they felt real. Completely and undoubtedly real. Blank sometimes woke up from this trance and wanted to cry from the absence, as she did now. But all she could do was feel herself breathe and wait for her mind to slip back into the excruciating-- though slightly more tolerable--trance.

_Gasp… gasp… gasp… gasp…_


End file.
